Abstract
It is generally
accepted that educational technology, especially ICT, is a productive and positive tool
(or set of tools) for bringing education to people to whom it would not normally be
available for reasons of distance or mobility, or that it provides methods of making
educative material more available in the sense of being easier to comprehend or analyse.
In both these cases terms like ‘tool’ or ‘method’ suggest a neutral,
non-emotive, non-political way of thinking about technology. I use Heidegger’s Question concerning Technology to interrogate this
perception. He makes a distinction between technology as a ‘means to an end’,
and technology as a ‘human activity’. The first I interpret as representing a
form or idea of technology which is not in itself political: it is the ‘end’
which is political, the means is not. Technology as a ‘human activity’ is a
positioning of technology as political. If technology (and science) is seen as apolitical,
this has certain political advantages, both to government and to educators, with regard to
educational technology. But I argue that it is impossible to separate technology from
political decision making, it is just that, with time, technological decisions become
naturalized and are no longer seen as contentious. Moreover, technology, as a form of
science made practical, carries with it the politics of science, which Donna Haraway
argues to be profoundly political, in its inclusion and exclusion of certain kinds of
people.
The move to conceptualize questions which are political
as technical effectively removes them from the theatre of political debate. Thus the
privileges of science and technology are obtained for activities which cannot b divorced
from questions of power, that is to say, from political questions.
But there is no
uncontaminated political or technological position, since every change or lack of change
embodies a certain set of power positions, so that the assumption, prevalent in government
and educational circles, that educational technology is an apolitical, merely instrumental
process, is called into question – the question being, the Question Concerning
Technology.
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